Assad’s Soft-Focus Vision for Syria, as Seen on YouTube

As unexpected as it might have seemed three summers ago, when hundreds of thousands of Syrians jammed the streets demanding that President Bashar al-Assad just “leave,” his landslide re-election, confirmed shortly after polls closed on Wednesday, surprised no one. Given that his supporters, in regions of the deeply divided nation now under government control, openly boasted of voting early and often, and that his opponents largely ignored the contest, the huge margin of victory was entirely believable.

Lots of firing into the air in Damascus. Election results not announced yet but I think they know who won... #Syria

While the turnout figures reported by state television were impossible to verify and struck some observers as suspiciously high, there is no doubt that Mr. Assad has considerable support in parts of Syria, and his supporters celebrated in the streets and online.

His opponents, meanwhile, continued to bitterly mock the president’s campaign slogan, “Together,” seen on banners hung from ruined buildings and in a series of soft-focus advertisements posted on his YouTube channel in the run-up to the election, all of which portrayed a Syria united and happy under his rule.

Those ads, like the relentlessly upbeat Instagram and Twitter feeds set up by his campaign, made no mention of Mr. Assad’s role in tens of thousands of deaths, or the displacement of millions of Syrians from their homes.

The campaign ads, all of which were wordless and set to inspirational music, were jarring mainly because they looked just like the glossy, patriotic vision created by campaign consultants for candidates in other nations. But in this case, they were set against the backdrop of landmarks recently fought over in battle or completely inverted the details of recent Syria history.

The campaign’s first ad, for instance, showed Syrians from all walks of life converging on the medieval castle Krak des Chevaliers, west of the city of Homs. Just last year, there was video of government airstrikes on rebel positions around the fortress, which was not recaptured until March.

A second commercial showed the joyous rebuilding on Baba Amr, a residential neighborhood of Homs that was flattened by government forces two years ago, after it had become a stronghold of the Free Syrian Army.

Another ad, showing children painting on a wall outside their school, struck some of Mr. Assad’s critics as particularly cruel, because it was the arrest and torture of schoolchildren for writing antigovernment graffiti on a wall in early 2011 that led to the first large street protests.

Just days before the polls opened, one of the last ads in the series struck a different tone, suggesting, through a metaphorical game of chess played by shadowy figures wearing Saudi, American and Israeli flag pins, that Syria might be seen as a pawn to foreign plotters, but was well able to defend itself in battle.